Symbols Quotes - Page 40

• Perhaps you have seen me. I know well, my purpose was merely that of a symbol, 'equals', 'times'... ; but what is said, for all that, was identity-less: a kind of live geometry.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Science, Identity, Purpose

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• Removing religious symbols from public places is not neutrality. On the contrary, it sends a highly negative message - that religion is something shameful, embarrassing, or at best strictly private.

  Charles Colson

  Christian, Religious, Messages

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• The ACLU sues no matter what public property a religious symbol is placed on.

  William Anthony Donohue

  Christian, Religious, Matter

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• I have been battering away at Saturn, returning to the charge every now and then. I have effected several breaches in the solid ring, and now I am splash into the fluid one, amid a clash of symbols truly astounding. When I reappear it will be in the dusky ring, which is something like the state of the air supposing the siege of Sebastopol conducted from a forest of guns 100 miles one way, and 30,000 miles the other, and the shot never to stop, but go spinning away round a circle, radius 170,000 miles.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Gun, Circles, Air

  James Clerk Maxwell (1990). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862”, p.538, CUP Archive

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• Berzelius' symbols are horrifying. A young student in chemistry might as soon learn Hebrew as make himself acquainted with them... They appear to me equally to perplex the adepts in science, to discourage the learner, as well as to cloud the beauty and simplicity of the atomic theory.

  John Dalton

  Clouds, Simplicity, Might

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• Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement--a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.

  David Elkind

  Good Life, Children, Work

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• The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Lonely, Loneliness, Artist

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• ... geometry became a symbol for human relations, except that it was better, because in geometry things never go bad. If certain things occur, if certain lines meet, an angle is born. You cannot fail. It's not going to fail; it is eternal. I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total. Thus, I'm able to avoid or manipulate or process pain.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Pain, Lines, Able

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• I question the negative connotations of fabric, of ribbon, of lace. I turn these symbols of our imprisonment around.

  Miriam Schapiro

  Art, Quilts, Women

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• A Status symbol is an instrument you clash when you want someone to know you are there.

  William Sansom

  Class, Want, Status Symbol

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• I'm not going to allow anybody to hold a badge up over me or a cross or any other power symbol and say I'm going to kill you and you're just going to kneel down to me because I'm the law.

  Ice T

  Law, Crosses, Badges

  Source: articles.latimes.com

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• Two-thirds of the Iranian people would like to be reconciled with the West. They don't like the fanaticism of the governing religious council. It's the only place in the world where the last six elections have been won by the more progressive candidate, two for president, two for the mayors, two for the parliament. So most people there are sympathetic to the world we Americans want to build, whether we're Republicans or Democrats. On the other hand, almost everybody there wants them to have nuclear power. They see it as a status symbol, and a sense of their own security.

  William J. Clinton

  Religious, Hands, Two

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• We thought of universities as the cathedrals of the modern world. In the middle ages, the cathedral was the center and symbol of the city. In the modern world, its place could be taken by the university.

  Roger Revelle

  Taken, Cities, Age

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• It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nerves, Degenerates, Language

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.144, Simon and Schuster

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• For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances of youth, become, in the progress of character, the most solid enjoyment.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Stars, Sex

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.216

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• For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Horse, House, Language

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.79, Courier Corporation

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• A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

  William Butler Yeats

  Spiritual, Expression, Flames

  William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Finneran, George Bornstein (2007). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays”, p.88, Simon and Schuster

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• The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to Johann Bernoulli: "I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  July, Letters, Dots

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• Things admit of being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every part.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Used, Whole

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.74, Coyote Canyon Press

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• The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Money, Law, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.381

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• The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Believe, Men

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• Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Eye, Men, Alphabet

  "What Skyscrapers Tell Us ... About Us" by Jonathan Merritt, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 22, 2011.

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• A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

  Carl Jung

  Sight, Goal, Promise

  Carl Gustav Jung (1976). “The Collected works”

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• Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  School, Political, Doctrine

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• Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.

  James Mackintosh

  Mind, Language, Praise

  Sir James Mackintosh (1851). “The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh: Complete in One Volume”, p.95

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